shoppers at the Miura outlet of kinds
home DIY are confronted at the door by
glaring red sign asking how solid is
your negative interest rate strategy
underneath it is a selection of
attractively priced safes the display is
not exactly a buzz with custom negative
interest rates nerb has certainly thrown
things off-kilter but for now at least
there was no mathematically compelling
reason for ordinary Japanese to spend 25
thousand yen on a metal box to keep
their cash at home the 0.001 percent
rate Japanese banks offer on normal
deposit account remains minutely above
zero and the Bank of Japan's policy has
been crafted to ring-fence individuals
the big unanswered question most
pertinently for the yen as it reels
around in search of a natural post nerve
range against the US dollar is what
those Japanese individuals are actually
doing with their cash the Enigma has
deepened following the Ministry of
Finance's most recent weekly portfolio
data for the week ending on February the
19th a week that saw the nerb coming
into force and spectacular Japanese net
buying of foreign bonds and foreign
stocks the former was the largest
reading since the data became available
in 2005 and the latter represented a
five hundred percent increase over the
previous week what the market can only
nervously guess at until March the 8th
however is the breakdown of that buying
the crucial answer to how much of the
action was banks pension funds and the
sort of investment products that
Japanese individuals tend to favor the
bank's purchases would tend to be
currency hedged while the pension funds
and investment trusts would not
if the breakdown shows that the buyers
were banks the yen may barely twitch
from its hundred and twelve to 113 range
against the dollar but if it emerges
that the outflows came from trusts Boyd
with money that staunch Lee refuses to
sit in a safe the market made bet
heavily on weeks more of large yen
depressing unhedged outflows